After many weeks working through Clementi's Preludes and Exercises with a young student - a brilliant exploration of the particular intonations of the different keys on the piano, as well as of expressive hand positions, I took another look at Chopin's Preludes.

All that talk of Chopin thinking of Bach when he composed them: I have never understood it. I now believe he was thinking of Clementi.

Clementi is a composer who has been sorely misunderstood by generations of piano teachers after having been sorely resented (apparently) by Mozart who, unfortunately, put his disdain into writing to be smugly quoted ad infinitum. There is no competition between the two, to be sure. But Clementi was an immensely insightful composer whose witty explorations of the new instrument offer a lot to ponder.

Now that instruments have stopped "talking" music theorists are desperately trying to put language back into music. I have heard many papers on erudite aspects of how music relates to linguistics, involving analyses of metric structures and melodic lines, for example, in relation to syllables and spoken phrase inflection.

But instruments used to talk! Abstruse argument was not required to get the drift.

In the same way that every voice has its own registral colorations and that vocal tuning is a matter of overtones vs. linear tension, so, too, instruments like the natural horn inflected pitches relative to one another by virtue of their diverse coloration--it was all part of the act, not something added on by some intellectual process.

You cannot tell me that among the first things composers noticed about the fortepiano was that the black keys and the white keys in juxtaposition produced differently inflected tone qualities. There was no other keyboard instrument that did so. And it happened all by itself, simply as a matter of instrumental mechanics.

And then piano teachers got the idea that all the notes should sound the same: Equal strength in all the fingers, equal strength in every successive tone of every scale. And then the theorists got busy trying to put language-referenced inflection back into music.

Connecting yesterday's post to the experience of playing the childhood-piano-lessons warhorses for an audience of octogenarians last week: The attention they brought to Chopin's Minute Waltz, the Rachmaninoff Prelude in C# minor, the Mozart Sonata in C, K. 545, among others, felt like the attention they wish had been brought to them when they were learning those pieces.

Imagine the messages we received from those impossible assignments: You should be able to play this; it is simple enough for you.

Imagine our consternation when we did play the notes and felt utterly confused by our inability to organize tempo proportions in the first movement of the Mozart, to play softly (three p's in the Rachmaninoff), to find the Chopin the least little bit interesting--experiences I recall vividly to this day and which I could not articulate at the time.

Teaching piano poses real dilemmas; among them, whether it is more important to be interested in what the student plays or to demand that the student's playing make no particular demands on the teacher's comprehension.

Opting for the first alternative, I find the students develop their musical minds in individual ways, only some of which make "sense" to me. That they interest me, even though I do not understand them, is proof enough to me that they are up to something.

The alternative is to require that all children sound more or less the same, or at least make the music sound more or less the way it has already sounded in someone else's hands.

Again and again I am reminded of how bored I was as a youngster playing what I now recognize to be the great masterworks of the piano. I will not allow children to begin a lesson by saying they have not practiced. And I will not allow them to be bored with masterworks. It is a challenge to figure out how to keep boredom from becoming an option.

On the subject of theoretical explanations blocking the perception of sound itself: All of my teaching of children can be categorized as experimental in the same sense that child-rearing is experimental, especially in this era of constant change. As the ground shifts under our feet we have to be flexible.

One of my prize students has been improvising since he was seven; he is now a senior in college. I have not taught him anything about theory though I draw his attention again and again to overtones. His improvisations have become increasingly organized in a way that I can comprehend using my own tendency to resort to music theory to account for what I hear.

Perhaps it is out of a Faustian bargain that we seek to prolong the moment of perception rather than allow it to be fleeting.

He does not listen to music that even remotely resembles his improvisation and will most likely not turn out to be a composer. I have always found passages in the words of the masters that use overtones in a manner consistent with his ear, so he knows that potentially relevant music does exist. He is a visual artist whose strength, as he is repeatedly told, is color.

When Robert Levin, looking sternly at his masterclass audience at the Manhattan School last spring, asked: "Do you know what is missing in Classical music?" He literally roared the answer: "HUMOR!!!"

I believe we have lost the sense of how funny notes can be. Okay, B-flat is not in itself funny. But...it is possible to imagine it as a source of hilarity. Why not? If you play a passage that does not sport one single black key and suddenly, out of nowhere, B-flat! Isn't that reason enough to break out in peals of laughter?

If not, why not? Have we become so conditioned to theoretical explanations for sounds that we no longer hear them?

The recital turned out to be one of the most moving I have ever played. From the very first note everyone in the room was rapt. As one listener later put it, she knew every note I played so it was as if she were reliving the experience of playing it.

Many pianists perform for this community but always run-throughs of programs intended for other audiences in other venues. This was a first: A program tailor-made for this audience. They really felt the difference.

It was a clear case of the interpersonal element of music performance that is so often lacking in formal recitals.

I experienced it once in a piano recital by Leon Fleischer back in the 1950's--more correctly, after the recital, when he played Fuer Elise as an encore following a program of some of the most difficult repertoire (Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue and Ravel's Valses Nobles et Sentimentales). After two seconds of tittering the audience in Severance Hall (Cleveland) became totally attentive. I never forgot it.